Before we start, I know that it is almost entirely indefensible having both Jeezy and Japanese city pop on the same playlist. Despite that irrefutable truth, I still have to try.
Music is so central to everything that I do, automotive related or not. Dig through my center console on a long enough road trip, and you’ll find a shattered iPod Nano from my youth for when I run Spotify dry. It permanently rests at the last, delicate angle where all of the necessary life support it’s attached to makes just enough connection to keep it powered on, and try and ignore the swelling battery pressing up against the display while you’re at it. Beyond just driving, by the time that I actually sit down to write an article for RC, I’ve spent about an hour just enjoying whatever Spotify wants me to hear. My windows are open, I’m wearing something I feel good in, I have an iced matcha next to me. My goal for working is to first create the sensation that my LA apartment is actually an LA record store, one where everybody secretly wants to know who makes my sweatpants (Reece Cooper).
And while I have the utmost respect for the bluetooth-speaker-cup-holder-warriors of the world who stripped their car completely and forgot they still have to get to the track, you’ll never see me with a carbon fibre radio blank plate for as long as I’m alive. Once you’ve embraced the absurdity of putting every song you like to drive to on one long playlist, there’s no going back.
I’ve recently been toying with the idea of adding some sort of Spotify integration to Racing-Couture.com (which you may have noticed above), mostly because I want you to be able to listen to the same music I do while I write these articles. As much fun as it is sliding the white balance to the right and feeling a shot become a line from a Sainté or Larry June or Mick Jenkins song, it would make more sense to just have the song next to the photo, so you can see what I was going for. In the spirit of Test Fit being shorter and a little more out there than my mainline blog posts, I wanted to I put together a short playlist of some of my all-timers for wasting fuel and taking photos to hopefully give some better insight into the musical whiplash it takes to make a WordPress website of this exquisite caliber. I tried my best to generally flow from one genre to the next, but there’s only so much I can do re: Jeezy and city pop. It has a little bit of everything, so I hope you find something on there you love just as much as I do.
I’ll leave it collaborative, so if you have Spotify, you can add your perfect driving songs to the playlist too, and I’ll do my best to update it periodically when I find something worth sharing myself. Whether you’re running away to the underground to go do street crime, you want to head bang on grid to a song produced in a shed in the UK, or you feel like taking a windows down, sun rise run up to the bliss that lives in the switchbacks just north of La Cañada Flintridge, I hope you can always find something fresh on there for wherever your automotive-audiophile journey takes you. I hope you enjoy our new playlist, and a few of the songs from it highlighted below.
1. HEAVEN TO ME – TYLER THE CREATOR
While I was still a Marketing Intern for Lexus Western Area, I had the unforgettable opportunity to borrow an IS500 for my birthday weekend. I was up at nearly five in the morning trying to get to the unbelievable views on the ACH right as the sun came over the valley. The refrain of the Heaven only knows sample in this song was muted by the staggering note of the NA 5 liter V8 available to my right foot, and with every window down in the car already, it was mostly a lost cause. The song transformed into a sort of subliminal backing track, nudging me to burn through $70 of gas, and when you get a sign as clear as that, who am I to say no?
2. Champagne Shots – Sainté
In one of my classier moments, I joined my very good friend, Joe Wu, at the Artcenter College of Design for an event honoring the automotive designer alumni of the school. A true lawn party, we were invited by a friend of his who was a student at the school, and who also happened to daily drive a 1974 Citroën DS 5. Par for the course for a designer, I suppose.
Feeling particularly couth myself, I made jokes about the day with Instagram captions referencing golf clapping and Margiela Tabis. That said, this smooth-belly Countach was a genuinely stunning car, and I wasn’t too disappointed with the photo either. Sainté’s Champagne Shots was the perfect track to drive with me back to Los Angeles that night, and so it earns its place on this playlist as a refined option for the discerning enthusiast interested in the bourgeois minutia of extravagant motorcoaches. Or something.
3. Chocolate – The 1975
Much to the dismay of the people closest to me, Chocolate by The 1975 is my favorite song of all time. It doesn’t really fit the high fashion, high quality, slightly snobby aesthetic of RC, but it’s the truth. And, in the spirit of being truthful, this photo of a couple of friends— Chris, and Eric, which I shot while hanging out of the window of an S14 in Connecticut, is the most Chocolate photo I have. The song is so light, and that’s the best way to describe how I felt taking this, the realization while coming around the hairpin on Clubhouse Circuit that this is exactly how life was supposed to feel. Surrounded by friends and fire extinguishers, this moment was where I always wanted to be.
Thanks so much for reading this week’s Test Fit! I’d love to explain more stories behind all 42 songs currently on the playlist, but I want to hear yours first. I can’t wait to see how this playlist changes over the next few months as we come around into windows down season again. If you have any problems accessing the playlist, keep me posted and I’ll do what I can to fix things. In the meantime, keep doing cool shit in cars, and I’ll see you back out there soon! ///RC
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